Light Ice
A Real Bastard
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2003
- Posts
- 5,395
Flanked almost entirely by fields and taking on several sharp turns toward the town’s limits, Route 24 was the most (if not the only) truly dangerous bit of pavement throughout the entire township, and it culminated at what the kids referred to as “Pinball Alley”. Deputy Chris Haley had seen his share of accidents along Route 24’s twisting curves. The road had become a kind of infamous attraction to the teens of Royal Oaks, Michigan and the towns that neighbored it.
One of the rare portions of County Route 54 that didn’t cut through flat farmlands, “Pinball Alley” twisted an alternating set of sharp curves through a grove of trees that marked the end of Royal Oaks’s territory. On the far side, on the Otisko County side, the road straightened out once again through long flat farms and properties. The last turn, which was where Deputy Haley had strategically backed his cruiser that morning, was bordered on one side by a thick grove of elms that perfectly concealed the Ford’s black and tan lines. The opposite side of the road was bordered by a four-foot deep drainage ditch that cut back toward a small creek running along the cornfield.
The niche that Chris sat in had become his choice spot for the month, allowing him to sit almost entirely concealed from the southbound lane of the road. He’d pulled over more than a few heavy-footed out-of-townies on their way into Royal Oaks for the local wineries. Sadly, today had followed in the wake of the previous one, and Chris hadn’t a single incident in the course of his shift. It was 12:11pm, and he’d nearly five more hours that promised to be as long and as tediously boring as the previous four. And it was fourth of July. Motherfucker.
Of course, that was before the burgundy Oldsmobile ripped past him and set his radar gun to twitter excitedly. Chris looked down and watched as the digital display printed “93 mph” in big, angry red letters. He’d barely been able to register “BgDaddy” on the vanity plate before the car was too far along for his eyes to make out the letters.
Chris wanted to reach down and key on his lights and siren. He wanted to pull out and chase down “BgDaddy”, maybe fuck with him a bit out of sheer boredom before pulling him over. There were more than a few things Chris wanted to do but what he –did- do was watch as the Burgundy Oldsmobile drifted recklessly into the northbound lane and then onto the shoulder beyond until its back tires skidded dangerously close to the ditch. It drifted there for a moment, great clouts of dust kicking up as the rear wheels fought for traction, threatening to continue its skid off the road.
And then abruptly the wheels found enough pavement to grip and launched the car directly across the road like an arrow, over the southbound shoulder, and into a thick-trunked elm tree with enough force to shatter the wood and send the tree tumbling backward into the grove of its brethren.
The impact was explosive, glass and fragments of steel and fiberglass were thrown into the air in a massive cloud of debris. A tiny, blonde-haired figure was launched from the back seat and through the vehicle’s windshield as the glass seemed to vaporize. It caught the elm’s splintered stump head-first. The sound of the impact was lost amidst the clamor of the wreck, but in a sickening tangle of tiny arms and legs it went cart-wheeling into the underbrush amidst a cloud of blood.
Holy Shit. That was a little girl.
He barely registered the though as the vehicle’s back end lifted almost six feet off the ground, hung for a moment as if to register the trauma that it had sustained, and then heavily fell back to the grass with an audible thud. There was almost nothing left of the Oldsmobile’s front end. Oil and gasoline sprayed everywhere, soaking the ground and putting the stench of petrol on the air.
Chris stepped out of the cruiser almost immediately, barely able to fight off the urge to empty his stomach on the shoulder of the road. In twelve years of service he had seen many fatal accidents along this stretch of road, mostly teenagers who drove like daredevils in an attempt to show off or prove something to themselves before skidding off the road and into the trees. Twelve years of watching the coroner pull mangled bodies from the road and still Officer Haley could not recall a single scene more horrifying than the one infront of him. The car hadn’t behaved like the driver lost control. It had behaved like the driver had made a sharp turn toward the trees, as if intent to kill himself and anyone inside. He’d never seen anything like it before.
The passengers in the Oldsmobile’s front seats weren’t moving, at least not from what he could see as he approached. A man was behind the wheel, half hidden by the off-white airbag that crushed him against the seat. Brown-haired and pot-bellied, he wore a white golf polo that’s collar was soaked entirely through in blood. His shorts had been blown upward toward his crotch.
The world’s worst wedgie, front –and- back. Crotch –and- Ass. Yeouch.
He had buckled his seat belt, but the air bag’s off-white was stained by a thick and heavy sheet of blood. As Chris neared he could see the man was clearly unconscious or dead, his head hanging crookedly out the shattered window of his car door.
The passenger was a woman, his wife, and had a thick mane of blond hair. Or she had once a thick mane of blonde hair, back before the car had slammed into a tree at ninety miles an hour. Half of her scalp was peeled back to reveal her skull, her shirt soaked heavily in blood. There was more gore in the wreck than he could register, and with each second it got far worse.
She lost her arm…
Chris blinked hard, clearing his eyes, but he wasn’t mistaken. The woman’s right arm had been shorn off at the shoulder by the force of the impact, a heavy streak of blood ran down the crumpled remnants of the car’s front end and arterial spray had splattered on the brush and grass beside the vehicle. He could only guess her arm was sixty, maybe seventy yards further into the brush. Once, in a convention for police in Detroit, he’d heard of collisions so violent that the forces involved actually ripped people apart.
I thought it was bullshit…
Chris had already recognized that nobody could be alive, and certainly didn’t believe it until his eyes betrayed him once more. He could have sworn, sworn to God Almighty, he had seen the driver’s head twitch. It wasn’t a healthy movement, but it was movement.
No way, Jose’. His neck is broke clean through. Even if he was alive he couldn’t move, and I’d bet the boat he’d never twitch his finger again let alone roll his head. The airbag nearly ripped it clean off.
But the driver twitched again, and this time he continued to move. At first his blank staring eyes rolled, and then they blinked rapidly. His entire body gave a hard, convulsive shutter that nearly had Chris convinced that his brain was firing some last message to the muscles in the driver’s body. Death throws, he’d heard them be called that before. But the body continued to shake, a minute, maybe two… before finally it stopped.
And them the driver’s eyes shot wide open, the pupils swiveled onto Chris, and the man in the car screamed.
Or rather, he made –some- ungodly sound. It was hard to accept the cry as human and certainly hard to accept it as a cry. It was high-pitched, feverishly hoarse, and utterly threatening.
“Calm down, sir. I’ll get help here soon.” Chris took a step forward, intent on calming the man before he shook himself so bad something broke.
But the man didn’t calm down. Infact, he seemed to lose his mind at the sound of Chris’ voice. His entire body began to jerk savagely at the seat belt, straining it. Flabby arms lifted and fell, pounding on the airbag as it deflated away, revealing more of the man’s potmarked face. What swelling Chris expected simply didn’t exist, leaving the man’s features harshed only by the sheen of his wife’s blood that soaked them and the speckled burn of the airbag’s powder. His cry became absolutely maddened, turning more and more shrill until it was a feral shriek.
Chris was suddenly terrified. The urge to run struck him so hard that he nearly obeyed it. Everything was telling him to flee, to run. The irrational power of fear sinking deep inside him and taking hold in his balls, especially as the man began to rip at his seat belt. The driver was acting in a way that Chris couldn’t register, slamming himself against the car’s restraints like he was either hopped up on drugs or pumped full of so much adrenaline his injuries didn’t matter.
What the hell is wrong with this guy? His neck looks broken!
And Chris’ eyes weren’t lying to him. The driver’s neck was not only broken, it was ripped out. He saw it as in the driver’s thrashing his head rolled unnaturally far to the left, swiveled back almost 180 degrees, and then was swung back around to face him as if it had been fastened to a rusted hinge. But beyond the fact there should have been no way the man could have twitched his finger, let alone pound his airbag down and yank at his seat belt was the fact his throat was –torn- open. Something had ripped it clean out, revealing the rubbery tube of the man’s Carotid artery.
And not anything in the crash, certainly not glass. Something had done that while he was driving, and that’s why he drove right into the tree. Where’s the dog now?
Chris entertained the thought that he had seen the dog ejected from the car, but he knew with sinking dread that it was otherwise. The thought of that tiny girl careening through the woods was enough to nearly break his heart and could have stolen his thoughts for minutes more had the driver not defied all logic and stepped from the car.
It took a moment for Chris to comprehend what he had just watched. In the back of his mind it played like a movie, over and over, as the driver ripped his seatbelt and slammed the door open with the palm of his hands. He didn’t unbuckle, he didn’t use the car door’s handle. He simply –ripped- the seatbelt apart, and then pounded on the door so hard it jerked open with a harsh whine of twisted metal.
And then the man turned toward Chris and charged him, making that same gut wrenching cry. His face a twisted mask of some kind of intense, mad, desperate rage.
He saved his life out of instinct, some great flash that ripped through his body in a most primal moment of self preservation. Chris had never struck another human being in his life but he struck the driver with enough force to shatter his left hand. The punch was awkward but powerful, a drive from his shoulder that pistoned out and caught the pot-bellied driver square in the chin, popping his head straight back and knocking the four front teeth in his bottom jaw loose.
He expected the man to fall over, to stagger and collapse and cough up blood. He expected the driver to roll onto his back and moan in agony, and to beg for help and snap suddenly from this madness. He desperately wanted for this man to act like he recognized he had just driven his car into a tree at ninety miles an hour and broke his neck, and that he’d been ripped open by a dog or –something- and was probably moments from bleeding to death.
Chris wanted so badly for all of those things to happen, but instead, the man simply stopped in his tracks and took a single, shaky step backward. And then, with an audible crack of broken bones as the head swung freely (like some kind of carnival imitation of a man with a broken neck), the man drove himself into Chris with an incredible amount of force and tackled him to the ground.
All at once Chris was being clawed and pounded on by the driver, his voice now a dangerous, almost hungry snarl. MORE FRIGHTENING however, was the driver’s head as it rolled on the broken stump of his neck, the jaws slamming again and again in an attempt to bite him. It was like he was rabid, clawing and biting furiously in an attempt to sate some kind of madness. The man’s hand pawed down the side of his face and his nails bit in, ripping a thin line down Chris’ cheek and filling his mouth with the coppered taste of his own blood. They were suddenly tangled together now, Chris jamming his hands up into the man’s face in an attempt to push him away only to find it hinged loosely
–because that neck is FUCKING BROKEN-
and fell back. The air smelled of blood, and death, and piss. Chris had a single moment where he realized he’d wet himself, where suddenly his crotch was hot and soaked through. It was that moment that had Chris leaving his hand in reach, and it was all it took for the driver to slam his teeth down on Chris’ ring finger and bite through it.
The pain was sharp and extraordinary, and it was followed by the audible crunch of the man’s teeth biting through his second knuckle. Chris watched as the man’s teeth locked like some kind of animal’s, and in his fear he jerked his hand back. The driver didn’t release him, and instead bit down harder, and Chris jerked against the pain. The movement and the pressure was too much and Chris watched, and felt, as his finger gave and tore from his hand. The bloody stump was pinched between the bloodied, broken teeth of the driver. His face was a horrible mask of insanity and feral hatred, eyes unnaturally pale, and splattered in blood.
Chris thrashed madly, suddenly mimicking the driver as he had convulsed against the car’s seatbelt. Adrenaline coursed through him, and with all of his focus poured into one task, he slammed his hands up into the driver’s shoulders. The impact of his hands into the man’s body sent fresh bolt of pain from Chris’ missing finger… and also managed to throw the driver from him. Chris only now realized he was screaming.
He scrambled madly to his feet, the incessant bolts of pain that leapt from his severed finger had mercifully dulled into a nagging throb. The driver popped to his feet. He didn’t rise, he didn’t roll and sit up. Instead, he simply slapped his palms into the ground beneath him and launched himself into a feral crouch. Chris managed to free the pistol, a heavy .45 automatic that suddenly felt every bit as intimidating as he had been told it was. Despite the shake of his hand, he lifted it, centering the iron sight on the driver.
What if I can’t pull the trigger, what if it sticks?
But the gun –did- fire, a great blast that jerked Chris’ tired arms far too much. The slug whistled wide of the driver and seemed to remind him of where Chris was. He turned his head, that potmarked face soaked in blood and sprayed now with bits of gravel. The driver’s thin, stringy brown hair had lost the neatly-combed part that concealed his receding hairline and now hung in straggled, hap-hazard lines. His lips curled back to reveal blood-stained teeth and he gave an awful shriek.
Chris emptied his magazine, wildly pulling the trigger on the .45 to send six more of the heavy jacketed rounds toward him.
The driver’s chest exploded as four rounds clustered high on his torso, ripping his shirt out in giant, bloodied stars. Raw force lifted him from his feet and knocked him to his back, blood seeping quickly beneath him to form a thick pool. He shook, hard, struggling as bones that once supported his paunchy frame failed to answer the call that was put to them. A visible effort to sit up was mustered, but the man managed only to half-roll himself onto his side. The arms that had so furiously beat down at Chris now pawed at the concrete, nails ripping away as they caught on the cracks.
Chris reloaded, nearly dropping the old magazine as he pushed a new one into place. The driver wasn’t dead and Chris felt it as wet himself for the second time.
He has to be dead. –Has- to be.
Infront of him, soaked in blood and torn by four slugs from Chris’ automatic at point blank range, the Driver finally managed to sit up. He began an unnaturally, disjointed rocking in an effort to get up. His body swayed forward and back, gouts of blood rolling from the great holes in his chest and back.
Chris shot him twice more, both rounds hitting the driver high in the chest and knocking him flat on his back. The teeth kept mashing, that awful shriek grew huskier in its distress but persisted… and the man attempted to rise still. Turning his head, Chris leveled the barrel of his automatic at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The pot-marked face disappeared, and a great pink-red smear splattered out across the concrete. Chunks of skull and flesh and matter formed a debris trail that followed the smear away from what little was left of the driver’s head. His body gave one last hard jerk and went entirely still.
Chris vomited down the front of his uniform, tattered and bloodstained and soaked in piss.
It was only now that his mind began to work again, slowly coming to life as relief swept through him. He forced himself to ignore his missing finger and look to the shattered remnants of the Oldsmobile. The driver’s wife was now thrashing in her seat, struggling with her remaining arm to rip off her seat belt. He had a minute, at least, before she got free in his mind and bent to take the driver’s wallet from his back pocket.
Timothy Arganna, and his wife Mrs. Arganna, and little Suzy-Q Arganna were tragically killed when Mr. Arganna went absolutely insane and drove their car off the road.
Chris laughed but he hated how it sounded. The fear was too palpable, too real. He forced himself to drop the wallet and walk to the Oldsmobile, thinking suddenly of his own wife and daughter. In his mind he could imagine some stranger putting a bullet in Ally’s head, he could see her beautiful face erased by the force of a .45 caliber pistol.
She was weaker than her husband, but whatever had taken his mind away had claimed her own. Standing beside the door, Chris watched as she suddenly turned her attention from the seatbelt and to him. One of her eyes was missing, or rather it had been popped like a bloody little balloon in the socket. She looked far worse than her husband, her face shattered and hanging in places where fine bones once maintained a feminine structure. She’d been pretty but it was hard to imagine it now.
She was snarling and snapping like an animal out the shattered window, lurching her body against the seatbelt. There was a mindless desperation in her, a compulsion to attack that Chris recognized in the husband. He put a bullet though her forehead, emptying her head on the seat and airbag and leaving her to slump lifelessly in the seat. The pale eyes, so furious a moment before, had the vacant look of the dead about them now. Chris leaned against the car and vomited for a second time, holding his knees and bowing his head forward while wretching forcefully onto the asphalt.
Between the summer heat and sheer terror Chris had sweat himself through. It was hard to look down and see himself in such a state and he could only imagine what he looked like to the outside eye. The seat of his cruiser felt infinitely more comfortable than it ever had, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so happy to pick up the radio. Pressing the button down, Chris turned his mouth into it, speaking through a gag as the transceiver began to slowly stink of vomit from his breath.
“844 to Base, come in Base. Marcy, I’ve a fucking mess out here.”
The radio crackled once before a woman’s voice came, and Chris suddenly felt the urge to cry build up in him. A touch of normality at this moment seemed so out of place. “Chris, what happened? You alright?” The concern in her words was real.
“I’m alright,” he said. “I’ve got a collision at Pinball Alley…” he trailed off. Chris was unsure what to say.
“I’ll send EMS.” The radio answered. “How bad is it?”
His words failed him, and Chris answered after a long hesitation. “Two fatalities, possibly a third. There was a passenger in the back who was ejected, I’m about to go see if I can help. And Marcy?”
“Yeah?”
“Call Alan, will you? Get him out here? I think he has to see this.”
Marcy’s patient voice immediately dissolved into concern as it came over the radio. “What’s wrong, Chris? You alright?”
He was crying now. The tears were thick and hot as they ran down his face, and it took every once of strength for Chris to keep it out of his voice. “I’m alright, Marcy. Just get the chief down here, alright? I’ll be in soon to tell you about it.”
“Roger. I’ll call him, Chris. EMS is on their way. Base clear.”
“Clear.” He echoed, and dropped the transceiver. All at once Chris was sobbing. his pistol laid across his lap as he buckled forward in his cruiser and laid his head on the steering wheel.
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Rebecca Arganna had been suffering for hours by the time her panicked father had crossed to Otisco County, laid out in the back seat of her father’s Oldsmobile as it rocketed down Route 54. She had her mother’s blonde hair, and her mother’s build. Her entire life she’d been called beautiful, and at the tender age of eight she had just begun to believe it. Nick Page had bit her on the way home that afternoon, enough to break the skin, and she had only gotten away because she hadn’t drank her milk at lunch and her thermos was full. When she swung her backpack at Nick’s head it’d hit with a dull thud, not a hollow thunk, and she’d managed to get up and run into her yard and close the gate behind her.
Nick had pounded on it for a bit, howling terribly, before taking off down the street to terrorize someone next door. She remembered all this clearly, but it began to get fuzzy after that. One moment she was sitting in the kitchen while her mother washed the bite on her wrist out and covered it so she wouldn’t get blood on her new T-shirt, and then the next she was laying in the back of her daddy’s car while he and mommy argued over where they were going.
It was all fast, and confusing. She felt worse and worse until finally it was easier to keep her eyes closed.
When Rebecca woke up she attacked her mother first, ripping a mouthful from the side of her throat and severing the carotid in a great geyser of blood. The taste wasn’t satisfying and she didn’t contemplate why. She simply obeyed the hunger that drove her on and turned on her father. It was her bite to his wrist that broke his grip on the wheel and sent them out of control.
Now, Rebecca Arganna woke for the second time to the insufferable hunger pawing at her. It was all she knew. One of her eyes couldn’t see but she couldn’t feel why. She didn’t know her name or knew what a name was. It was swinging from her ocular nerve against her cheek, popped out of her little head when it slammed into the tree. There was no memory of Nick or school, of mom or dad… There was nothing but the hunger. She smelled him and heard him first, and then she saw him finally. He was crying on the steering wheel of his cruiser, but Rebecca no longer understood what crying or a steering wheel was. She knew only that the hunger demanded him and that she had to answer.
At fifty-three pounds Rebecca was not a particularly strong girl but at a full run she managed to not only strike Chris with enough force to send his pistol onto the passenger seat’s floor but send him sprawling over the center console.
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He was screaming now and had he anything in his bladder he’d have lost it in that instant. It was the daughter, the realization was all the more terrifying and she’d caught him unaware. Her teeth sunk into his cheek and her head jerked back, and suddenly Chris felt pain lacing through his face. The tiny girl swallowed, only to bite him again, her little fingers driving into his face pushing his chin up with strength he’d not have expected. He felt her fingers close on his tongue and gagged, and then without explanation bit down. Bones ground beneath his teeth and Chris bit harder and the little girl didn’t scream or relent in her attack. She only snarled that animal sound that her father and mother snarled and slammed her other hand into his eye.
He bit her little hand clean off, the taste of her blood unnatural and wrong. It wasn’t the coppery taste of blood, but something fouler. He opened his mouth to scream, but Rebecca’s teeth found his throat and sunk deep. All at once Chris felt his air cut off and his hands fell down to knot in the girl’s blond hair. She was shaking her head like a little pitbull, and Chris felt his throat stretch to its limits and then the skin tear free.
Hot blood fountained in the air, a thick arterial spray that soaked the ceiling and windshield of his cruiser and bathed Rebecca as she sat up on his hips. Eyes wide, Chris lifted his hand and pressed it to the gaping hole in his neck only to feel the rush as blood spilled against his palm, over the stump of his missing finger and between the others. All at once the strength drained from him, and his other hand dragged a futile protest against the front of Rebecca’s shirt.
She tilted her head back and swallowed, a thick chunk of Chris’ throat sliding into her stomach. If her eyes had been beautiful once they weren’t any longer, the deep green color now so pale they hardly registered anything but the most iced of grey. Chris watched as she bent and abruptly took his wrist into her mouth but he couldn’t feel her bite down and take a chunk from him.
She looks just like her mother.
He thought, but there was no serenity now. Chris wanted to scream and thrash but his body would not answer him, he felt trapped and terrified as he watched this little girl take chunk out of chunk from his arm. Every moment slipped by with a prayer for death, and when it finally came he could find no solace in it. The last thing that Deputy Chris Haley saw before he died was the girl (about his daughter’s age) bend down to his face for a moment and sit up amidst a spray of his blood, the stump of his tongue protruded from her split lips as she chewed on it and the tiny ball of her eye watched him as it swung against her cheek from the bloodied nerve.
It would be nearly three hours before little Rebecca Arganna reached Royal Oaks.
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The town was just starting to wake. Just starting to find that hum of excitement that always precipitated the July 4th Celebration. Kids heckled their parents for sparklers and smoke-bombs, illegal fireworks that they knew the teenagers had but wouldn’t share with them nomatter how many pleases they muttered or how many times they threatened to tell mom and dad. The town was just starting to wake up and he was just starting to get tired, hulking over a picnic table after the last seat was mended and the last bunting hung. Six hours and counting of preparation, a great deal of it on his own, the kind of hard diligent trying work that most men and women feel obligated to see to.
But it wasn’t obligation for him. Not at all. The rest of the town sank steadily into excitement, throbbed and pulsed with life and vigor and the contented happiness of all things American while he? He sat there. He watched them. And he got angrier. To say that the rage was making a dent wasn’t fair, not in the least. The anger had been growing so long and so quietly now that there wasn’t any doubt that it’d the ability to turn liquid in order to stay contained. He’d mastered the art of loathing everything and everybody without giving them the scarcest of hints. It curled up through him with the brutality of a snake bite, infecting everything. It’d consumed so much of him that he felt but a shill to what had once been John Shepard’s son, pride of Royal Oaks.
They certainly wouldn’t have loved him if they knew just how desperate he was getting and just how empty he was. The Christian tenants of the church, a literal Hail Mary effort to save himself, had fallen brutally short of their promised salvation. He’d found the church so uncomfortable he’d almost lost his cool, broken the façade, let the stoic face crack and all the darkness slip out of him and spread along infront of the neighbors to whom he was ordered to provide.
Owen Shepard was barely keeping himself cared for. Sure, by the looks of him, you’d never find a healthier man. The lean plane of his body was carved by daily exercises, daily movements. His grooming was meticulous. Each were a part of the daily rituals that helped him navigate the nagging emptiness swirling and growing inside him. Each of those little motions, from flicking the light switches on and off to counting every push-up in time was a connection to the world he was so quickly falling away from.
So many happy faces. A mockery. He loved them and hated them for their ignorance. The purity of partnership and family and peace fell on these people in buckets, drenched them with the kind of fortune he had been unable to obtain. The rottenness came from envy. He wasn’t proud of it. Infact, the cold nature of it all never failed to announced itself to him. The lack of pride often crossed to outright shame, which shred what confidence he could ever manage to gather and spun him right round into the darkness again. Mondays were the easiest days. Friday’s the hardest. And each weekend he’d get in his truck and drive to the only relief he’d let himself have besides the work.
And fuck, did he work.
Six hours. Two barrel cookers. Enough ribs and wings to feed the small army of men and women that’d beset the plaza. The Royal Oaks All-American Independence Day Parade, a joyful little slice of Americana, paraded the Grape Queen and King from George Washington High on the backs of pick-up trucks. Music, food, fireworks and fun. A carnival atmosphere that was supported by the stalls manned by most of the town’s vintners.
It’d started to draw a crowd ten years ago. Back then, of course, Owen had still been a happy man. He was a soldier and a son, a husband. Things made sense and felt real, tangible, achievable. Anyway, Earl Botts had been the first to lay out a table featuring his wines. The others followed. And what had once been a town-wide celebration turned into a wine-lover’s holiday getaway. The tourists rolled in. Old and white, young and rich. They pissed money out of their pockets and into the town and left feeling better for it.
It was a beautiful thing. A little slice of celebrity for a town good enough to deserve it.
Kipper’s Tavern had donated kegs. Owen had set them in big plastic tubs colored in pastel red and blue, buried them in ice. He’d had a couple to calm his nerves, calm the ocean of feelings churning through him. Calm the memories.
“You alright, Shep?” His dad’s nickname. He wore it unwillingly.
But the rest couldn’t know by the way he smiled. Owen gave it his best as he stood up, reclaiming his full height and moping his sweaty brow with the back of a flannel-clad arm.
It was Don “Kipper” Manischevic. The man’s broad face and round nose was distinctly polish and his balding head a consequence of being in his fifties. He clapped Owen’s shoulder.
“Sure.” Owen nodded. “But I should get to taking orders and making up plates.”
Don shook his head and lifted a hand, pointing at Paula. “She’s all over it, Shep. Try and relax. The old man would be proud.”
“Thanks, Don.” He said, managing another smile. It was sincere enough to disarm his father’s friend. “But I have to get to the shop real quick. I had a surprise to set up.”
Fireworks. His dad’s old tricks reborn. He doubted Don had forgotten. When his dad had died Owen had done his best to slip right into his place, keep things going. The fireworks display that he managed every summer had gotten bigger and bigger and with Owen it was no different. If he hurried he’d be finished by seven. That’d give him two hours to have a hotdog and a couple drinks before it was time to set them off.
The world helped him stay balanced. The tight schedules and endless focus on the tasks at hand grounded him from the grief and the loneliness. He knew that. None of it escaped him. Owen was bright enough to understand that he was barely hanging on. The issues were deep rooted. He couldn’t break the cycle.
But he refused to let it make him unproductive. A man could suffer unhappiness. You learned that in the Army. Suffering unhappiness was a life skill, a reality. It was a way of accepting that in so many ways your lot was chosen for you and the fates were cruel.
“I’m sure it’ll be the best one yet, Shep!” Don called. A big smile on his face.
Owen loved Don like an Uncle. Like so many of the townspeople being kind to them was easy, even with his unhappiness, because they were tremendous neighbors. After all, deep down, he knew it wasn’t their fault that thins had turned out this way. Sometimes the world just dealt you a folding hand and waited to see what you’d do.
Owen wasn’t the folding type. He bluffed.
His phone rang before he reached the door to the store, vibrating angrily in his pocket as he struggled to fish them out of his jeans. The haste in his deft hands robbed them of their dexterity, turned them dumb as he pinched them together around the phone’s plastic and struggled to slip it free. It was an old flip-phone that Marla had gotten him before he’d shipped out the second time, a way to try and get ahold of her. Neither of them had known that the phone didn’t work across the ocean without a special calling plan. They couldn’t afford it. He’d kept it with him anyway, a reminder.
By the time he got the phone out of his pants the call was gone. A number blinking in reply.
He unlocked the store and went in, moving past the racks. Outside there were calls, muffled through the glass. A firecracker went off in the street. Owen ignored it, lowered his head and dialed Sarah’s number, unconcerned with the children beginning to lurk outside. His attention fixed as he stood amidst the racks of his store. Wishing, just wishing, that the day was over and he could make his lonely drive up to Detroit.
( This thread is closed. Readers are invited to send comments through PMs but are encouraged not to post in this thread. )
One of the rare portions of County Route 54 that didn’t cut through flat farmlands, “Pinball Alley” twisted an alternating set of sharp curves through a grove of trees that marked the end of Royal Oaks’s territory. On the far side, on the Otisko County side, the road straightened out once again through long flat farms and properties. The last turn, which was where Deputy Haley had strategically backed his cruiser that morning, was bordered on one side by a thick grove of elms that perfectly concealed the Ford’s black and tan lines. The opposite side of the road was bordered by a four-foot deep drainage ditch that cut back toward a small creek running along the cornfield.
The niche that Chris sat in had become his choice spot for the month, allowing him to sit almost entirely concealed from the southbound lane of the road. He’d pulled over more than a few heavy-footed out-of-townies on their way into Royal Oaks for the local wineries. Sadly, today had followed in the wake of the previous one, and Chris hadn’t a single incident in the course of his shift. It was 12:11pm, and he’d nearly five more hours that promised to be as long and as tediously boring as the previous four. And it was fourth of July. Motherfucker.
Of course, that was before the burgundy Oldsmobile ripped past him and set his radar gun to twitter excitedly. Chris looked down and watched as the digital display printed “93 mph” in big, angry red letters. He’d barely been able to register “BgDaddy” on the vanity plate before the car was too far along for his eyes to make out the letters.
Chris wanted to reach down and key on his lights and siren. He wanted to pull out and chase down “BgDaddy”, maybe fuck with him a bit out of sheer boredom before pulling him over. There were more than a few things Chris wanted to do but what he –did- do was watch as the Burgundy Oldsmobile drifted recklessly into the northbound lane and then onto the shoulder beyond until its back tires skidded dangerously close to the ditch. It drifted there for a moment, great clouts of dust kicking up as the rear wheels fought for traction, threatening to continue its skid off the road.
And then abruptly the wheels found enough pavement to grip and launched the car directly across the road like an arrow, over the southbound shoulder, and into a thick-trunked elm tree with enough force to shatter the wood and send the tree tumbling backward into the grove of its brethren.
The impact was explosive, glass and fragments of steel and fiberglass were thrown into the air in a massive cloud of debris. A tiny, blonde-haired figure was launched from the back seat and through the vehicle’s windshield as the glass seemed to vaporize. It caught the elm’s splintered stump head-first. The sound of the impact was lost amidst the clamor of the wreck, but in a sickening tangle of tiny arms and legs it went cart-wheeling into the underbrush amidst a cloud of blood.
Holy Shit. That was a little girl.
He barely registered the though as the vehicle’s back end lifted almost six feet off the ground, hung for a moment as if to register the trauma that it had sustained, and then heavily fell back to the grass with an audible thud. There was almost nothing left of the Oldsmobile’s front end. Oil and gasoline sprayed everywhere, soaking the ground and putting the stench of petrol on the air.
Chris stepped out of the cruiser almost immediately, barely able to fight off the urge to empty his stomach on the shoulder of the road. In twelve years of service he had seen many fatal accidents along this stretch of road, mostly teenagers who drove like daredevils in an attempt to show off or prove something to themselves before skidding off the road and into the trees. Twelve years of watching the coroner pull mangled bodies from the road and still Officer Haley could not recall a single scene more horrifying than the one infront of him. The car hadn’t behaved like the driver lost control. It had behaved like the driver had made a sharp turn toward the trees, as if intent to kill himself and anyone inside. He’d never seen anything like it before.
The passengers in the Oldsmobile’s front seats weren’t moving, at least not from what he could see as he approached. A man was behind the wheel, half hidden by the off-white airbag that crushed him against the seat. Brown-haired and pot-bellied, he wore a white golf polo that’s collar was soaked entirely through in blood. His shorts had been blown upward toward his crotch.
The world’s worst wedgie, front –and- back. Crotch –and- Ass. Yeouch.
He had buckled his seat belt, but the air bag’s off-white was stained by a thick and heavy sheet of blood. As Chris neared he could see the man was clearly unconscious or dead, his head hanging crookedly out the shattered window of his car door.
The passenger was a woman, his wife, and had a thick mane of blond hair. Or she had once a thick mane of blonde hair, back before the car had slammed into a tree at ninety miles an hour. Half of her scalp was peeled back to reveal her skull, her shirt soaked heavily in blood. There was more gore in the wreck than he could register, and with each second it got far worse.
She lost her arm…
Chris blinked hard, clearing his eyes, but he wasn’t mistaken. The woman’s right arm had been shorn off at the shoulder by the force of the impact, a heavy streak of blood ran down the crumpled remnants of the car’s front end and arterial spray had splattered on the brush and grass beside the vehicle. He could only guess her arm was sixty, maybe seventy yards further into the brush. Once, in a convention for police in Detroit, he’d heard of collisions so violent that the forces involved actually ripped people apart.
I thought it was bullshit…
Chris had already recognized that nobody could be alive, and certainly didn’t believe it until his eyes betrayed him once more. He could have sworn, sworn to God Almighty, he had seen the driver’s head twitch. It wasn’t a healthy movement, but it was movement.
No way, Jose’. His neck is broke clean through. Even if he was alive he couldn’t move, and I’d bet the boat he’d never twitch his finger again let alone roll his head. The airbag nearly ripped it clean off.
But the driver twitched again, and this time he continued to move. At first his blank staring eyes rolled, and then they blinked rapidly. His entire body gave a hard, convulsive shutter that nearly had Chris convinced that his brain was firing some last message to the muscles in the driver’s body. Death throws, he’d heard them be called that before. But the body continued to shake, a minute, maybe two… before finally it stopped.
And them the driver’s eyes shot wide open, the pupils swiveled onto Chris, and the man in the car screamed.
Or rather, he made –some- ungodly sound. It was hard to accept the cry as human and certainly hard to accept it as a cry. It was high-pitched, feverishly hoarse, and utterly threatening.
“Calm down, sir. I’ll get help here soon.” Chris took a step forward, intent on calming the man before he shook himself so bad something broke.
But the man didn’t calm down. Infact, he seemed to lose his mind at the sound of Chris’ voice. His entire body began to jerk savagely at the seat belt, straining it. Flabby arms lifted and fell, pounding on the airbag as it deflated away, revealing more of the man’s potmarked face. What swelling Chris expected simply didn’t exist, leaving the man’s features harshed only by the sheen of his wife’s blood that soaked them and the speckled burn of the airbag’s powder. His cry became absolutely maddened, turning more and more shrill until it was a feral shriek.
Chris was suddenly terrified. The urge to run struck him so hard that he nearly obeyed it. Everything was telling him to flee, to run. The irrational power of fear sinking deep inside him and taking hold in his balls, especially as the man began to rip at his seat belt. The driver was acting in a way that Chris couldn’t register, slamming himself against the car’s restraints like he was either hopped up on drugs or pumped full of so much adrenaline his injuries didn’t matter.
What the hell is wrong with this guy? His neck looks broken!
And Chris’ eyes weren’t lying to him. The driver’s neck was not only broken, it was ripped out. He saw it as in the driver’s thrashing his head rolled unnaturally far to the left, swiveled back almost 180 degrees, and then was swung back around to face him as if it had been fastened to a rusted hinge. But beyond the fact there should have been no way the man could have twitched his finger, let alone pound his airbag down and yank at his seat belt was the fact his throat was –torn- open. Something had ripped it clean out, revealing the rubbery tube of the man’s Carotid artery.
And not anything in the crash, certainly not glass. Something had done that while he was driving, and that’s why he drove right into the tree. Where’s the dog now?
Chris entertained the thought that he had seen the dog ejected from the car, but he knew with sinking dread that it was otherwise. The thought of that tiny girl careening through the woods was enough to nearly break his heart and could have stolen his thoughts for minutes more had the driver not defied all logic and stepped from the car.
It took a moment for Chris to comprehend what he had just watched. In the back of his mind it played like a movie, over and over, as the driver ripped his seatbelt and slammed the door open with the palm of his hands. He didn’t unbuckle, he didn’t use the car door’s handle. He simply –ripped- the seatbelt apart, and then pounded on the door so hard it jerked open with a harsh whine of twisted metal.
And then the man turned toward Chris and charged him, making that same gut wrenching cry. His face a twisted mask of some kind of intense, mad, desperate rage.
He saved his life out of instinct, some great flash that ripped through his body in a most primal moment of self preservation. Chris had never struck another human being in his life but he struck the driver with enough force to shatter his left hand. The punch was awkward but powerful, a drive from his shoulder that pistoned out and caught the pot-bellied driver square in the chin, popping his head straight back and knocking the four front teeth in his bottom jaw loose.
He expected the man to fall over, to stagger and collapse and cough up blood. He expected the driver to roll onto his back and moan in agony, and to beg for help and snap suddenly from this madness. He desperately wanted for this man to act like he recognized he had just driven his car into a tree at ninety miles an hour and broke his neck, and that he’d been ripped open by a dog or –something- and was probably moments from bleeding to death.
Chris wanted so badly for all of those things to happen, but instead, the man simply stopped in his tracks and took a single, shaky step backward. And then, with an audible crack of broken bones as the head swung freely (like some kind of carnival imitation of a man with a broken neck), the man drove himself into Chris with an incredible amount of force and tackled him to the ground.
All at once Chris was being clawed and pounded on by the driver, his voice now a dangerous, almost hungry snarl. MORE FRIGHTENING however, was the driver’s head as it rolled on the broken stump of his neck, the jaws slamming again and again in an attempt to bite him. It was like he was rabid, clawing and biting furiously in an attempt to sate some kind of madness. The man’s hand pawed down the side of his face and his nails bit in, ripping a thin line down Chris’ cheek and filling his mouth with the coppered taste of his own blood. They were suddenly tangled together now, Chris jamming his hands up into the man’s face in an attempt to push him away only to find it hinged loosely
–because that neck is FUCKING BROKEN-
and fell back. The air smelled of blood, and death, and piss. Chris had a single moment where he realized he’d wet himself, where suddenly his crotch was hot and soaked through. It was that moment that had Chris leaving his hand in reach, and it was all it took for the driver to slam his teeth down on Chris’ ring finger and bite through it.
The pain was sharp and extraordinary, and it was followed by the audible crunch of the man’s teeth biting through his second knuckle. Chris watched as the man’s teeth locked like some kind of animal’s, and in his fear he jerked his hand back. The driver didn’t release him, and instead bit down harder, and Chris jerked against the pain. The movement and the pressure was too much and Chris watched, and felt, as his finger gave and tore from his hand. The bloody stump was pinched between the bloodied, broken teeth of the driver. His face was a horrible mask of insanity and feral hatred, eyes unnaturally pale, and splattered in blood.
Chris thrashed madly, suddenly mimicking the driver as he had convulsed against the car’s seatbelt. Adrenaline coursed through him, and with all of his focus poured into one task, he slammed his hands up into the driver’s shoulders. The impact of his hands into the man’s body sent fresh bolt of pain from Chris’ missing finger… and also managed to throw the driver from him. Chris only now realized he was screaming.
He scrambled madly to his feet, the incessant bolts of pain that leapt from his severed finger had mercifully dulled into a nagging throb. The driver popped to his feet. He didn’t rise, he didn’t roll and sit up. Instead, he simply slapped his palms into the ground beneath him and launched himself into a feral crouch. Chris managed to free the pistol, a heavy .45 automatic that suddenly felt every bit as intimidating as he had been told it was. Despite the shake of his hand, he lifted it, centering the iron sight on the driver.
What if I can’t pull the trigger, what if it sticks?
But the gun –did- fire, a great blast that jerked Chris’ tired arms far too much. The slug whistled wide of the driver and seemed to remind him of where Chris was. He turned his head, that potmarked face soaked in blood and sprayed now with bits of gravel. The driver’s thin, stringy brown hair had lost the neatly-combed part that concealed his receding hairline and now hung in straggled, hap-hazard lines. His lips curled back to reveal blood-stained teeth and he gave an awful shriek.
Chris emptied his magazine, wildly pulling the trigger on the .45 to send six more of the heavy jacketed rounds toward him.
The driver’s chest exploded as four rounds clustered high on his torso, ripping his shirt out in giant, bloodied stars. Raw force lifted him from his feet and knocked him to his back, blood seeping quickly beneath him to form a thick pool. He shook, hard, struggling as bones that once supported his paunchy frame failed to answer the call that was put to them. A visible effort to sit up was mustered, but the man managed only to half-roll himself onto his side. The arms that had so furiously beat down at Chris now pawed at the concrete, nails ripping away as they caught on the cracks.
Chris reloaded, nearly dropping the old magazine as he pushed a new one into place. The driver wasn’t dead and Chris felt it as wet himself for the second time.
He has to be dead. –Has- to be.
Infront of him, soaked in blood and torn by four slugs from Chris’ automatic at point blank range, the Driver finally managed to sit up. He began an unnaturally, disjointed rocking in an effort to get up. His body swayed forward and back, gouts of blood rolling from the great holes in his chest and back.
Chris shot him twice more, both rounds hitting the driver high in the chest and knocking him flat on his back. The teeth kept mashing, that awful shriek grew huskier in its distress but persisted… and the man attempted to rise still. Turning his head, Chris leveled the barrel of his automatic at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The pot-marked face disappeared, and a great pink-red smear splattered out across the concrete. Chunks of skull and flesh and matter formed a debris trail that followed the smear away from what little was left of the driver’s head. His body gave one last hard jerk and went entirely still.
Chris vomited down the front of his uniform, tattered and bloodstained and soaked in piss.
It was only now that his mind began to work again, slowly coming to life as relief swept through him. He forced himself to ignore his missing finger and look to the shattered remnants of the Oldsmobile. The driver’s wife was now thrashing in her seat, struggling with her remaining arm to rip off her seat belt. He had a minute, at least, before she got free in his mind and bent to take the driver’s wallet from his back pocket.
Timothy Arganna, and his wife Mrs. Arganna, and little Suzy-Q Arganna were tragically killed when Mr. Arganna went absolutely insane and drove their car off the road.
Chris laughed but he hated how it sounded. The fear was too palpable, too real. He forced himself to drop the wallet and walk to the Oldsmobile, thinking suddenly of his own wife and daughter. In his mind he could imagine some stranger putting a bullet in Ally’s head, he could see her beautiful face erased by the force of a .45 caliber pistol.
She was weaker than her husband, but whatever had taken his mind away had claimed her own. Standing beside the door, Chris watched as she suddenly turned her attention from the seatbelt and to him. One of her eyes was missing, or rather it had been popped like a bloody little balloon in the socket. She looked far worse than her husband, her face shattered and hanging in places where fine bones once maintained a feminine structure. She’d been pretty but it was hard to imagine it now.
She was snarling and snapping like an animal out the shattered window, lurching her body against the seatbelt. There was a mindless desperation in her, a compulsion to attack that Chris recognized in the husband. He put a bullet though her forehead, emptying her head on the seat and airbag and leaving her to slump lifelessly in the seat. The pale eyes, so furious a moment before, had the vacant look of the dead about them now. Chris leaned against the car and vomited for a second time, holding his knees and bowing his head forward while wretching forcefully onto the asphalt.
Between the summer heat and sheer terror Chris had sweat himself through. It was hard to look down and see himself in such a state and he could only imagine what he looked like to the outside eye. The seat of his cruiser felt infinitely more comfortable than it ever had, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so happy to pick up the radio. Pressing the button down, Chris turned his mouth into it, speaking through a gag as the transceiver began to slowly stink of vomit from his breath.
“844 to Base, come in Base. Marcy, I’ve a fucking mess out here.”
The radio crackled once before a woman’s voice came, and Chris suddenly felt the urge to cry build up in him. A touch of normality at this moment seemed so out of place. “Chris, what happened? You alright?” The concern in her words was real.
“I’m alright,” he said. “I’ve got a collision at Pinball Alley…” he trailed off. Chris was unsure what to say.
“I’ll send EMS.” The radio answered. “How bad is it?”
His words failed him, and Chris answered after a long hesitation. “Two fatalities, possibly a third. There was a passenger in the back who was ejected, I’m about to go see if I can help. And Marcy?”
“Yeah?”
“Call Alan, will you? Get him out here? I think he has to see this.”
Marcy’s patient voice immediately dissolved into concern as it came over the radio. “What’s wrong, Chris? You alright?”
He was crying now. The tears were thick and hot as they ran down his face, and it took every once of strength for Chris to keep it out of his voice. “I’m alright, Marcy. Just get the chief down here, alright? I’ll be in soon to tell you about it.”
“Roger. I’ll call him, Chris. EMS is on their way. Base clear.”
“Clear.” He echoed, and dropped the transceiver. All at once Chris was sobbing. his pistol laid across his lap as he buckled forward in his cruiser and laid his head on the steering wheel.
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Rebecca Arganna had been suffering for hours by the time her panicked father had crossed to Otisco County, laid out in the back seat of her father’s Oldsmobile as it rocketed down Route 54. She had her mother’s blonde hair, and her mother’s build. Her entire life she’d been called beautiful, and at the tender age of eight she had just begun to believe it. Nick Page had bit her on the way home that afternoon, enough to break the skin, and she had only gotten away because she hadn’t drank her milk at lunch and her thermos was full. When she swung her backpack at Nick’s head it’d hit with a dull thud, not a hollow thunk, and she’d managed to get up and run into her yard and close the gate behind her.
Nick had pounded on it for a bit, howling terribly, before taking off down the street to terrorize someone next door. She remembered all this clearly, but it began to get fuzzy after that. One moment she was sitting in the kitchen while her mother washed the bite on her wrist out and covered it so she wouldn’t get blood on her new T-shirt, and then the next she was laying in the back of her daddy’s car while he and mommy argued over where they were going.
It was all fast, and confusing. She felt worse and worse until finally it was easier to keep her eyes closed.
When Rebecca woke up she attacked her mother first, ripping a mouthful from the side of her throat and severing the carotid in a great geyser of blood. The taste wasn’t satisfying and she didn’t contemplate why. She simply obeyed the hunger that drove her on and turned on her father. It was her bite to his wrist that broke his grip on the wheel and sent them out of control.
Now, Rebecca Arganna woke for the second time to the insufferable hunger pawing at her. It was all she knew. One of her eyes couldn’t see but she couldn’t feel why. She didn’t know her name or knew what a name was. It was swinging from her ocular nerve against her cheek, popped out of her little head when it slammed into the tree. There was no memory of Nick or school, of mom or dad… There was nothing but the hunger. She smelled him and heard him first, and then she saw him finally. He was crying on the steering wheel of his cruiser, but Rebecca no longer understood what crying or a steering wheel was. She knew only that the hunger demanded him and that she had to answer.
At fifty-three pounds Rebecca was not a particularly strong girl but at a full run she managed to not only strike Chris with enough force to send his pistol onto the passenger seat’s floor but send him sprawling over the center console.
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He was screaming now and had he anything in his bladder he’d have lost it in that instant. It was the daughter, the realization was all the more terrifying and she’d caught him unaware. Her teeth sunk into his cheek and her head jerked back, and suddenly Chris felt pain lacing through his face. The tiny girl swallowed, only to bite him again, her little fingers driving into his face pushing his chin up with strength he’d not have expected. He felt her fingers close on his tongue and gagged, and then without explanation bit down. Bones ground beneath his teeth and Chris bit harder and the little girl didn’t scream or relent in her attack. She only snarled that animal sound that her father and mother snarled and slammed her other hand into his eye.
He bit her little hand clean off, the taste of her blood unnatural and wrong. It wasn’t the coppery taste of blood, but something fouler. He opened his mouth to scream, but Rebecca’s teeth found his throat and sunk deep. All at once Chris felt his air cut off and his hands fell down to knot in the girl’s blond hair. She was shaking her head like a little pitbull, and Chris felt his throat stretch to its limits and then the skin tear free.
Hot blood fountained in the air, a thick arterial spray that soaked the ceiling and windshield of his cruiser and bathed Rebecca as she sat up on his hips. Eyes wide, Chris lifted his hand and pressed it to the gaping hole in his neck only to feel the rush as blood spilled against his palm, over the stump of his missing finger and between the others. All at once the strength drained from him, and his other hand dragged a futile protest against the front of Rebecca’s shirt.
She tilted her head back and swallowed, a thick chunk of Chris’ throat sliding into her stomach. If her eyes had been beautiful once they weren’t any longer, the deep green color now so pale they hardly registered anything but the most iced of grey. Chris watched as she bent and abruptly took his wrist into her mouth but he couldn’t feel her bite down and take a chunk from him.
She looks just like her mother.
He thought, but there was no serenity now. Chris wanted to scream and thrash but his body would not answer him, he felt trapped and terrified as he watched this little girl take chunk out of chunk from his arm. Every moment slipped by with a prayer for death, and when it finally came he could find no solace in it. The last thing that Deputy Chris Haley saw before he died was the girl (about his daughter’s age) bend down to his face for a moment and sit up amidst a spray of his blood, the stump of his tongue protruded from her split lips as she chewed on it and the tiny ball of her eye watched him as it swung against her cheek from the bloodied nerve.
It would be nearly three hours before little Rebecca Arganna reached Royal Oaks.
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The town was just starting to wake. Just starting to find that hum of excitement that always precipitated the July 4th Celebration. Kids heckled their parents for sparklers and smoke-bombs, illegal fireworks that they knew the teenagers had but wouldn’t share with them nomatter how many pleases they muttered or how many times they threatened to tell mom and dad. The town was just starting to wake up and he was just starting to get tired, hulking over a picnic table after the last seat was mended and the last bunting hung. Six hours and counting of preparation, a great deal of it on his own, the kind of hard diligent trying work that most men and women feel obligated to see to.
But it wasn’t obligation for him. Not at all. The rest of the town sank steadily into excitement, throbbed and pulsed with life and vigor and the contented happiness of all things American while he? He sat there. He watched them. And he got angrier. To say that the rage was making a dent wasn’t fair, not in the least. The anger had been growing so long and so quietly now that there wasn’t any doubt that it’d the ability to turn liquid in order to stay contained. He’d mastered the art of loathing everything and everybody without giving them the scarcest of hints. It curled up through him with the brutality of a snake bite, infecting everything. It’d consumed so much of him that he felt but a shill to what had once been John Shepard’s son, pride of Royal Oaks.
They certainly wouldn’t have loved him if they knew just how desperate he was getting and just how empty he was. The Christian tenants of the church, a literal Hail Mary effort to save himself, had fallen brutally short of their promised salvation. He’d found the church so uncomfortable he’d almost lost his cool, broken the façade, let the stoic face crack and all the darkness slip out of him and spread along infront of the neighbors to whom he was ordered to provide.
Owen Shepard was barely keeping himself cared for. Sure, by the looks of him, you’d never find a healthier man. The lean plane of his body was carved by daily exercises, daily movements. His grooming was meticulous. Each were a part of the daily rituals that helped him navigate the nagging emptiness swirling and growing inside him. Each of those little motions, from flicking the light switches on and off to counting every push-up in time was a connection to the world he was so quickly falling away from.
So many happy faces. A mockery. He loved them and hated them for their ignorance. The purity of partnership and family and peace fell on these people in buckets, drenched them with the kind of fortune he had been unable to obtain. The rottenness came from envy. He wasn’t proud of it. Infact, the cold nature of it all never failed to announced itself to him. The lack of pride often crossed to outright shame, which shred what confidence he could ever manage to gather and spun him right round into the darkness again. Mondays were the easiest days. Friday’s the hardest. And each weekend he’d get in his truck and drive to the only relief he’d let himself have besides the work.
And fuck, did he work.
Six hours. Two barrel cookers. Enough ribs and wings to feed the small army of men and women that’d beset the plaza. The Royal Oaks All-American Independence Day Parade, a joyful little slice of Americana, paraded the Grape Queen and King from George Washington High on the backs of pick-up trucks. Music, food, fireworks and fun. A carnival atmosphere that was supported by the stalls manned by most of the town’s vintners.
It’d started to draw a crowd ten years ago. Back then, of course, Owen had still been a happy man. He was a soldier and a son, a husband. Things made sense and felt real, tangible, achievable. Anyway, Earl Botts had been the first to lay out a table featuring his wines. The others followed. And what had once been a town-wide celebration turned into a wine-lover’s holiday getaway. The tourists rolled in. Old and white, young and rich. They pissed money out of their pockets and into the town and left feeling better for it.
It was a beautiful thing. A little slice of celebrity for a town good enough to deserve it.
Kipper’s Tavern had donated kegs. Owen had set them in big plastic tubs colored in pastel red and blue, buried them in ice. He’d had a couple to calm his nerves, calm the ocean of feelings churning through him. Calm the memories.
“You alright, Shep?” His dad’s nickname. He wore it unwillingly.
But the rest couldn’t know by the way he smiled. Owen gave it his best as he stood up, reclaiming his full height and moping his sweaty brow with the back of a flannel-clad arm.
It was Don “Kipper” Manischevic. The man’s broad face and round nose was distinctly polish and his balding head a consequence of being in his fifties. He clapped Owen’s shoulder.
“Sure.” Owen nodded. “But I should get to taking orders and making up plates.”
Don shook his head and lifted a hand, pointing at Paula. “She’s all over it, Shep. Try and relax. The old man would be proud.”
“Thanks, Don.” He said, managing another smile. It was sincere enough to disarm his father’s friend. “But I have to get to the shop real quick. I had a surprise to set up.”
Fireworks. His dad’s old tricks reborn. He doubted Don had forgotten. When his dad had died Owen had done his best to slip right into his place, keep things going. The fireworks display that he managed every summer had gotten bigger and bigger and with Owen it was no different. If he hurried he’d be finished by seven. That’d give him two hours to have a hotdog and a couple drinks before it was time to set them off.
The world helped him stay balanced. The tight schedules and endless focus on the tasks at hand grounded him from the grief and the loneliness. He knew that. None of it escaped him. Owen was bright enough to understand that he was barely hanging on. The issues were deep rooted. He couldn’t break the cycle.
But he refused to let it make him unproductive. A man could suffer unhappiness. You learned that in the Army. Suffering unhappiness was a life skill, a reality. It was a way of accepting that in so many ways your lot was chosen for you and the fates were cruel.
“I’m sure it’ll be the best one yet, Shep!” Don called. A big smile on his face.
Owen loved Don like an Uncle. Like so many of the townspeople being kind to them was easy, even with his unhappiness, because they were tremendous neighbors. After all, deep down, he knew it wasn’t their fault that thins had turned out this way. Sometimes the world just dealt you a folding hand and waited to see what you’d do.
Owen wasn’t the folding type. He bluffed.
His phone rang before he reached the door to the store, vibrating angrily in his pocket as he struggled to fish them out of his jeans. The haste in his deft hands robbed them of their dexterity, turned them dumb as he pinched them together around the phone’s plastic and struggled to slip it free. It was an old flip-phone that Marla had gotten him before he’d shipped out the second time, a way to try and get ahold of her. Neither of them had known that the phone didn’t work across the ocean without a special calling plan. They couldn’t afford it. He’d kept it with him anyway, a reminder.
By the time he got the phone out of his pants the call was gone. A number blinking in reply.
He unlocked the store and went in, moving past the racks. Outside there were calls, muffled through the glass. A firecracker went off in the street. Owen ignored it, lowered his head and dialed Sarah’s number, unconcerned with the children beginning to lurk outside. His attention fixed as he stood amidst the racks of his store. Wishing, just wishing, that the day was over and he could make his lonely drive up to Detroit.
( This thread is closed. Readers are invited to send comments through PMs but are encouraged not to post in this thread. )